Castle Raid 2 Review

To say the truth, I’ve only played original Castle Raid for a little while, so my experiences with this sequel aren’t really comparable. I’ve seen enough to suggest that the games aren’t wholly different. Castle Raid 2 is just as fun, has a bit better graphics, more units, and a larger campaign – but the gameplay only differs in details. It’s still a hellish time-sinker, regardless of whether you play it with a friend, or against an AI.

Story in Castle Raid spins in a surprising direction from the original. While human armies are fighting against each other, the whole kingdom and nearby lands get overrun by orcs that drive the humans off their own land. This forces the old enemies to band together, and claim their lands back. This means that the blue units are now people, and the red – orcs, both having distinct armies with different looks – although they’re still completely identical in powers, abilities and costs. Honestly, my biggest – and probably, only – peeve with Castle Raid 2 is that I really wanted to see at least two sides with unique units and abilities. That would turn this fine strategy into an amazing one.

The two sides are resting on different sides of the screen in their castles, protected by two towers. The task is always the same: to destroy the enemy’s castle, and stop him from doing the same with yours. To do this, the players can summon up to five kinds of units, with a cap of 16 units on the field per kind. This is actually pretty grand, and the battles look pretty impressive, disregarding the relatively small scale of the maps. Also, there’s a lot more unit types available, but the player has to pick five of them, before starting a map. To spawn the units, player has to have enough gold. The gold is slowly dripping from nowhere, and can also be obtained from trees (don’t ask) by workers. Units can be summoned anywhere near the player’s castle, and move by themselves to the enemy side, attacking any enemy they encounter. They can get level-ups either by killing enemies, or if the player spawns three units of the same kind together, making one of them more powerful from the start. There are also two towers on both sides of the field. After a lengthy recharge, one can obliterate a certain area near the player’s castle, and the other can rain fire across the whole map – if the player aims it correctly. Players can’t order units around the map directly, but there’s a couple of small tricks that grant some sort of field control.

Describing Castle Raid 2 in detail requires a substantial amount of writing, so I’ll wrap it up. I didn’t note issues with the game, because frankly, I didn’t have any. Maybe the graphics look a bit simple, and the two sides are identical in properties, but apart from that – it’s an awesome strategy that manages to combine simple, unique rules and easily understandable mechanics with an incredible strategic depth. It contains tons of challenging levels in single-player, each one with three difficulty levels, and with two challenge modes – and when you complete all that, there’s also an ingenious single-device multiplayer. Castle Raid 2 is easily the best mobile strategy I’ve enjoyed playing, in months.

Castle Raid 2 Review Rundown

7.5

Graphics/Sound - It's not really fancy, and some units sound a whole lot like Warcraft, but it also doesn't need a dozen cores to run smoothly.

8.5

Controls - Incredibly simple.

9

Gameplay - Incredibly complex.

9

Replay Value - Almost infinite.

9

Overall - It's really good - one of the very few times I got hyped over a mobile strategy.